Why We Chose Rust for Spin — Beyond the Obvious: Our Journey into Rust

When Fermyon set out to implement Spin , the open source framework for building serverless WebAssembly applications, the decision to use Rust wasn’t just logical — it felt inevitable.

Sure, we could cite the obvious characteristics of Rust, like its memory safety guarantees without garbage collection, its quick performance, or its growing ecosystem.

But for us at Fermyon, these reasons were only the beginning of the story. We appreciated the depth of Rust’s philosophy and tooling, and its alignment with our goals for Spin.

Here’s why we chose Rust, and how it has helped us shape Spin into the powerful tool we envisioned.

It all began with wasmtime

Spin assists you in building and running WebAssembly (Wasm) workloads. We use wasmtime as the WebAssembly runtime in Spin. wasmtime itself is written in Rust, and this gave us a significant head start.…